High school student Kevin Terris, from Claremont, CA has
found the smallest and most complete known fossilized skeleton at the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. The dinosaur would have grown to
about 25 feet in length if it had been able to reach adulthood. This plant
eating baby tube-crested dinosaur Parasaurolophus would have lived about 75 million years ago and roamed across much
of the western portion of North America. The duck-billed (hadrosaurid) Parasaurolophus featured a long
hollow bony tube on top of its head, which paleontologists speculate would have
been used to emit a trumpet like sound to communicate.

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The baby Parasaurolophus, nicknamed 'Joe', was found by
Terris in 2009 and is less than a quarter the size of an adult Parasaurolophus.
He has an emerging "low bump" on the top of his head, which would have
eventually grown into a larger bony tube capable of emitting sounds. Further
investigation of this portion of the skeleton revealed a high-pitched vocal
capability suggesting that 'Joe' and his juvenile peers voices differed from
their parents. The age of 'Joe' was estimated based upon the size of a sample leg
bone when it was compared to an adult leg bone. Because scientists know that
the age of this kind of dinosaur can be determined by counting concentric rings
(similar to that of a tree trunk) on a cross-section of a bone, a sample from 'Joe' indicated that he wasn’t even one year old at the time of his untimely death.
Yet the remainder of the anatomy shows dramatic growth in that short life.
Other dinosaur species don’t demonstrate the same kind of rapid growth
comparatively. Typically a dinosaur's ornamentation does not become a prominent
feature until much closer to adulthood. The finding of this specimen indicates a
deviation from the norm for this species.

Not quite a quarter the size of its adult version, the six
foot long skeleton was excavated and subsequently cleaned and preserved by the
Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology. The importance and completeness of this
specimen warranted extensive 3D digital scans that are freely available for
study online via http://www.dinosaurjoe.com.

The actual specimen is now on exhibit at the Alf Museum in Claremont,
California. The museum is the only nationally accredited museum located on a
secondary school campus.